Handle With Care Zine

It was the November of 2021 when I think I first felt it. Like really, really felt it. Around this time I'd been pushing paperbacks to poindexters at a small mom-and-pop store. I came to love a lot about that job between the modest responsibilities of Funko flipping and shelf tetris. After all, In Hialeah, selling comic books was about as cushy as it got for a no sabo kid. But honestly? The best part had always been the cabinets.

Tony, our owner, had always preferred pins — the proper kind, Stern or Bally though Gottlieb's infamous Shaq Attaq was our newest. I'd been aware of the term objectum at the time, and had come to appreciate them as some of the first objects I “checked out,” so to speak. I found the hypnotic strobe of their idling marquees particularly attractive, but it wasn't like the sound of their callouts carried in any way I interpreted as alive.

Neil was the cabinet man. He didn't know that, but it's what I called him. He'd come in twice-monthly to wax their playing fields and run the maintenance gauntlet. Pinball machines, I'd come to learn, were a money pit. Maybe this is why I fell in love with my own boondoggle of a car later.

It wasn't like customers were routinely breaking my door down, so we eventually got to talking. Turns out he serviced the cabinets down at the local coin op, Arcade Odyssey. I knew the venue to be the real deal, with everything from imports to retro classics, tokens and all. In a world where analog tech was going the way of the dodo, it truly was a last stand against what I'd call the enshittification of the modern American arcade.

It didn't take much for Neil to suss out that I was interested in his work. I wasn't exactly playing it cool with how I'd peer over his shoulder and dump about a million questions onto his busy hands below. Some deeply dysphoric part of me wondered if I was intruding on what was unequivocally a “man's” hobby, but to my surprise, he asked me what I was doing next Monday.

So I guess that's how I found myself inside the warehouse.

We walked the arcade's main floor first, where Neil introduced me to its games like they were old friends. Fire Escape was a lucky rescue from a demolished warehouse. Meltdown was so rare following its post-Chernobyl recall that two broken units were refurbished into one working cabinet — and when that wasn't enough, Neil had to get crafty with some telephone wire to replace its cabling.

I remember that striking me when I first heard it, how these machines, edging ever-closer to obsoletion, often required an innovative keeper. We were looking into the cavity of a shoot-em-up when Neil pointed to one of its corners, towards a specialized component he'd sweet-talked a university into sourcing for him; something about getting its archaic CRT to recognize the light gun's input with a modern alternative.

Arcade Odyssey's warehouse felt less like a workspace and more like an archive. He'd told me the Smithsonian was a frequent caller, and it wasn't hard to piece together why when we finally stepped inside.

We cut a path through shelving brimming with gutted boards, cabinet brains in FedEx boxes heaped higher than any grown man was tall. Machines stood shoulder-to-shoulder, catty-cornered, organized chaos that spanned vintage gems to modern mainstays. Some were in the process of being refurbished, others cycled out to rest themselves following their brief exhibition to the public. After all, don't we all need a vacation?

There couldn't have been more than four rooms branching off a narrow hallway, made narrower still with the likes of Pole Polarity and Ataxx. One of the tidiest held an original Pong cabinet and Computer Space, the first commercially available arcade game. Here the clutter parted, practically making space for them, and I remember running my hands against the chunky dials, the fluorescent office lights robbing the woodgrain of its warmth and causing Computer Space's glittering enamel paint to look almost automotive.

Personable as they were, I think it was Discs of Tron that spoke to me first.

It commanded attention despite the slammed showroom. Known as a “total environment cabinet,” DOT, as Neil affectionately called it, was designed to immerse its players completely with a step-in design that reminded me a bit of a standing version of enclosed rail shooters like Jurassic Park.

I'd been told it was exceptionally rare, but the novelty of that meant little to me. I was more transfixed by the side panel art, a blue-red technoscape that surely came alive beneath neon arcade lights. I don't know when Neil left the room, but I do remember the maddening pull once he did.

I think about it often. What would've happened if I'd taken the opportunity to step inside. I was maybe a foot away from the cabinet when I realized I could smell it, the stale fabric funk of old carpet warmed by sawdust and phosphor. There was something almost animalic about it. Alive.

There was a sudden understanding. A tacit admission, somewhere deep inside me, that these things had a life all their own. I'd always struggled to empathize with my objectum peers; I found machines fetching, yes, but never imagined them as animate in any way. Yet there's something very magical that happens when you meet an object where it's at: when you stop thinking like a person.

Even when inert, there seemed to be a presence there. Something inhuman but distinctly conscious in the way a machine is. Hello, most cabinets seemed to say with their flashy marquees and canned callouts. Step inside.

Maybe if I did I'd have divined something from its interior. Would it feel like something was whispering stories of shuttered arcades as I traced every scuff, dent, and ding? That close, would the carpet still reek of cardboard pizza and soda syrup?

I'd say “if only machines could talk,” but I think it was there when I realized that they did, though in their own way. One just needed to learn to listen.

I don't have many pictures from my college days. I grappled with the perverse feeling of taking up space — of being too girlish, too starstruck by the corridors of cabinets. Here, in what felt like a man's domain, how was I not to overstep?

But I handed my phone to Neil, puzzled up against Computer Space, draped my arm against its console and offered a smile that felt almost sheepish. I remember looking at the photo he took and thinking that, for the first time, I really looked like myself. Like a boy. Not a particularly handsome one, something like the far-flung cousin of a Microsoft intern, but if I had to have taken one photo ...

For many people, their objectumsexuality has informed all of themselves for as long as there has been a person to inform. There are some of us that have always known, deep within us, that something can become someone. Others describe their realization as a clarion call, an experience that suddenly illuminated what they might've suspected but could not define.